Quotes from Michael J. Sandel

Science can investigate nature and inquire into the empirical world, but it cannot answer moral questions or disprove free will. That is because morality and freedom are not empirical concepts. We can't prove that they exist, but neither can we make sense of our moral lives without presupposing them.

A carefully crafted evasion pays homage to the duty of truth-telling in a way that an outright lie does not. Anyone who goes to the bother of concocting a misleading but technically true statement when a simple lie would do expresses, however obliquely, respect for the moral law.

It is said that the Puritans banned bearbaiting, not because of the pain it caused the bears but because of the pleasure it gave the onlookers.

El Estado no debería ratificar —con sus políticas o sus leyes— ninguna concepción determinada de la vida buena, sino proporcionar un marco neutral de derechos, dentro del cual las personas puedan escoger sus propios valores y fines.

Few politicians speak that way today. In the decades after RFK, progressives largely abandoned the politics of community, patriotism, and the dignity of work, and offered instead the rhetoric of rising.

Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else. I think this misreads our predicament. The problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little. Our politics is overheated because it is mostly vacant, empty of moral and spiritual content. It fails to engage with big questions that people care about.

then Rawls may have a point. Even effort can't be the basis of moral desert. The claim that people deserve the rewards that come from effort and hard work is questionable for a further reason: although proponents of meritocracy often invoke the virtues of effort, they don't really believe that effort alone should be the basis of income and wealth.

If I am responsible for having accrued a handsome share of worldly goods—income and wealth, power and prestige—I must deserve them. Success is a sign of virtue. My affluence is my due.

ancient theories of justice start with virtue, while modern theories start with freedom. And

They resented meritocratic elites, experts, and professional classes, who had celebrated market-driven globalization, reaped the benefits, consigned working people to the discipline of foreign competition, and who seemed to identify more with global elites than with their fellow citizens.

Altruism, generosity, solidarity and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously.

But beyond fairness and productivity, the liberal argument also gestured toward a third, more potent ideal implicit in the case for markets: Enabling people to compete solely on the basis of effort and talent would bring market outcomes into alignment with merit. In a society where opportunities were truly equal, markets would give people their just deserts.

Consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters.

They defined one benefit of a higher speed limit as a quicker commute to and from work, calculated the economic benefit of the time saved (valued at an average wage of $20 an hour) and divided the savings by the number of additional deaths. They discovered that, for the convenience of driving faster, Americans were effectively valuing human life at the rate of $1.54 million per life. That was the economic gain, per fatality, of driving ten miles an hour faster.15

Toleration and freedom and fairness are values too, and they can hardly be defended by the claim that no values can be defended. So it is a mistake to affirm...that all values are merely subjective.

The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic.

Outrage is the special kind of anger you feel when you believe that people are getting things they don't deserve. Outrage of this kind is anger at injustice.

The most obvious reason for giving the best flutes to the best flute players is that doing so will produce the best music, making us listeners better off. But this is not Aristotle's reason. He thinks the best flutes should go to the best flute players because that's what flutes are for—to be played well.

greed that preys on human misery (...)

Government may not interfere with individual liberty in order to protect a person from himself, or to impose the majority's beliefs about how best to live. The only actions for which a person is accountable to society, Mill argues, are those that affect others. As long as I am not harming anyone else, my "independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."19

Markets express and promote certain attitudes to the goods being exchanged.

If meritocracy is an aspiration, those who fall short can always blame the system; but if meritocracy is a fact, those who fall short are invited to blame themselves.

Moral excellence does not consist in aggregating pleasures and pains but in aligning them, so that we delight in noble things and take pain in base ones. Happiness is not a state of mind but a way of being, "an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.

Another way of putting this point is to say that morality is not empirical. It stands at a certain distance from the world. It passes judgment on the world. Science can't, for all its power and insight, reach moral questions, because it operates within the sensible realm.